Monday, September 27, 2010

Rennie McQuilkin’s poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. He is the author of ten poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Weathering: New & Selected Poems(2009); and he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the State of Connecticut. He co-founded and for nine years directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival. In 2003 he received the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award for service to the literary community. Rennie McQuilkin lives in Simsbury, CT.

SOLSTICE

At the very instant of Solstice, when the sun stands still,all things are at that Moment of Equilibriumwhen an egg will stand on end.

Nothing stands still this Solstice dawn.Light lengthens on the bedroom ceiling, assuming the form of a cross

with a bright amber squareat its crux. What physics is this? I’m used toshadows — mullions and grackles.

A gilded blur begins to circle the top of the cross,and the boy in me sees a perfect P-40 hung fromthe ceiling, propeller pin-wheeling, glue still bright

where wings and body meet. The bishop in meknows better — knows it’s the Holy Cross,the crux of it the terrible brilliance of an open heart.

Now the base of the Cross is dividing,dividing again, becoming long side-by-side legs,and the cross piece too is doubling, is blessedly

a pair of arms pinnedby another pair of arms. Nothing staysstill — the legs are twining,

and her eyes are taking me in, brighter by the minute.From the heart of us a light less amber than citron,less citron than gold, is simplifying

whatever was merely humanuntil nothing is left of us but Light…which slowly grows fainter, is gone — lets us down

to earth like anything perfectly upright declining,falling, a moment after its Momentof Equilibrium.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Watching light patterns move across the bedroom ceiling in the early morning before full awareness is narcotic—like looking up into a ceiling mirror or a skyful of clouds. It’s impossible not to begin conjuring shapes which are blessedly meaningless but which might, upon reflection, shape themselves into possibilities of meaning, multiple and even contradictory possibilities. That happened. It happened in the way I like best—the images came before the words.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

I love revising, but only when re-vision is just that and brings me closer to the original experience a poem is striving to approximate. In this case it dawned on me that the way I’d seen the light-on-the-ceiling had begun in a child-like manner before moving into deeper waters in a sort of historical sequence. In revision, it seemed apt to place the boy-in-me before the bishop. In addition, I hope I upped the ante of emotion in the poem during revision. An instance might be the twelfth line (“the crux of it the terrible brilliance of an open heart”), which emerged during revision. Much of the poem, however, remained unchanged, even though minor alterations led to the usual plethora of drafts that I staple one on another. I suppose my poems are sedimentary, though I hope they are also igneous. I’m not the one to say.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I wouldn’t make a distinction between the two: for me, the most important sort of revision is “received.” As I mentioned earlier, it moves me closer to whatever was lying low when I wrote the first draft of the poem in question. The perspiring sort of revision doesn’t appeal. For that reason, short spurts of revision work better for me than long bouts of it. The less important but still vital sort of revision (tightening, focusing, clarifying, adding necessary detail, perfecting a rhyme scheme, and so forth) also comes most naturally to me during those short spurts.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

When I saw that “Solstice” was tending to form itself in tercets, I helped it in that direction.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

About 18 months. It was accepted by The Gettysburg Review about a year after I was fairly (but not completely) satisfied with it.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I do believe that a poem should sit a while (a year is none too long) before being sent out. I like to have a look at unpublished poems periodically while they sit on the bench. Pretentious language, vagueness and all the other shocking ills to which one’s verse is heir have a way of hiding out until seen in the cold and critical light of time. I also like to let poems brew several days at least before I set pen to paper. I am interested in the way memories, dreams and the like begin to accumulate around a notion that might not be fully gestated if delivered too early.Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

I see no reason why a poem must be slavishly loyal to fact. The essential truth is often not the literal truth. At the very least, a poem should be free to present facts selectively and impressionistically. In this case, however, the facts of the ceiling light show were so mysterious that I simply described them. I did conjure up the pin-wheeling propeller, though the way light appeared on the ceiling in one of its incarnations did for a time make it a balsa model, and the motion of the light was dizzying. The notion of an egg standing on end at the instant of Solstice has always appealed to me, even if I know it to be fiction, notwithstanding a friend’s assurance that it’s God’s truth. Some things ought to be true. So in the heart, they are. When I first began conjuring the poem, I thought it was headed for some sort of epiphany at the end. But the poem itself had other ideas: a fact of life that belied the fiction I had in mind. Oh, I forgot to say there was no literal lady in bed with me. Not on that occasion. I conjured her out of delectos past. There’s the fiction, flagrant but delicious! Or is it fiction at all? Perhaps the poem presents the lady as a Lass of the Imagination. That, Dear Reader, I leave to you.

Is this a narrative poem?

Well, it does tell a story, albeit one that happens in the mind’s eye. That makes it narrative, I suppose. I like poems that journey.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I know that whatever I’ve been reading has a way of being reflected in what I write. Indirectly, I hope. But I can’t remember what I’d been reading at the time I wrote “The Solstice.” Whatever it was, I’m sure it crept in, like my dreams of the night before the morning after.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

I always have a Dear Reader in mind, one I’d like to understand what I write but also be willing to stay with a poem long enough to do some spelunking. I can’t stand the sort of writing that aims to mystify or say I’m smarter than thou, but I do want to give my Dear Reader credit for curiosity and intelligence. For me, the best writing lies somewhere in between the totally inscrutable and the boringly scrutable. ’Tis a gift to be simple, though not simple-minded. The best art of all sorts is always the simplest, but only on the surface—like the most significant scientific theories. It’s interesting to watch a writer like Dylan Thomas move from verbal complexity to verbal simplicity, while at the same time increasing the complexity of his underlying message.

I have on occasion written poems for friends, but poems I have sent out into the world, even when they have been partly for the eyes of one beholder, have always wished to invite curious bystanders to have a look. For me, any poem worth its salt should have myth and archetype at its heart. With luck, their presence might make the poem a letter to the world.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

I firmly believe in vetting a poem. The writing groups to which I have belonged have toughened up my writing enormously, and the wonderful readers to whom I show my work in the first instance have been the eyes of my eyes.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Hmmmm.

What is American about this poem?

I hope “Solstice” is more international than American, at least I would wish it to be. But I suppose we all write out of a context that is both personal and national. I doubt a German writer would refer to a P-40 hanging from his ceiling, though he might have a Fokker up there.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I still feel something is missing, but I’m not sure what it is. I love issuing poems for anthologies or new books, since that gives me a chance to re-see them, imagining my way back in. If I do this completely enough, I sometimes find a phrase, a fact, even a facet that is missing.

In that same year, after Lefty Watson missedhis third straight placekick against Salem High,

we rushed the field. Lefty’s father, in a blackand orange track suit, shimmied up the goal posts

and, beating the air with his fists, incitedwhat the Umpqua Register would later call

a riot. But the Salem team walked off the fieldunharmed, if a bit confused, as we stayed behind

to rip out every inch of turf. In that same year,when the single-vessel fleet of the Devil Ray

Fishing Company returned with an empty hold,the owner took a five-pound sledge to the keel

and let the ship sink. In that same year, whenPamela Reese learned she would never have

children, she stopped throwing anything away,and slowly her house filled up with garbage,

distended bags of it clotting the hallways, bagssagging the attic beams, bags overflowing

through the windows onto the reeking lawn.In that same year, when Ambrose Hecklin’s only

son was run over by a pickup truck, Ambrose droveall the way to Lincoln City, walked up to the first

car salesman he could find, and shot himin the face. In that same year, when Nell Barrett,

last speaker of the Siuslaw language, died alonein her two-room bungalow, her estranged son

showed up at the county clinic the next morningwith a mouth full of blood, and though outsiders

would later claim he’d accidentally bitten offhis own tongue in a drunken fit, we knew

the truth before the doctor found the filet knifein his coat pocket. So when the dead whale

washed up on our beach, of course we triedto blow it up. The newscasters, who’d come

from as far as Portland when they heard our plan,were shocked when the blast only carved out

a U-shaped hole in the animal’s stomach.The out-of-towners, who had come to gawk

and jeer, ran for cover as basketball-sized chunksof whale rained on the parking lot a hundred yards

away. But we were not in the least bit shaken.If we have learned anything from this, said

our city engineers, standing on the beach in theirgory parkas, it is that we need more dynamite.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The part about a beached whale in Florence being blown up with dynamite is true. I don’t remember exactly when I heard about this incident, but I completed an initial draft of the poem in October of 2006. The incident made me think of the saying that when the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. That was the sort of psychology I wanted to explore in the poem, the kind of culture that would think using dynamite on a dead whale was a sensible solution. Because, the truth is, I can sympathize with that kind of thinking, even though its pitfalls are pretty evident.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

Well, I revise as I write, so my “first” drafts already have a lot of back-and-forth revisions behind them. After the poem was initially completed, though, there was one major revision, where I scaled back some of the crazier things the town did. Then I made a few superficial changes later, like breaking the poem into couplets. Unfortunately, I’m not always good about saving old drafts, so I don’t remember exactly what I cut out and changed. From starting the poem to arriving at the version that was published took about two or three years, though I certainly wasn’t working on it all that frequently during that time.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I think I’m supposed to say here that inspiration is a myth, but I don’t think it would be honest if I said that. I’ve certainly written poems (or parts of poems) that felt received, that mystified me—as in, where the hell did that come from? The last three lines of this poem were certainly like that; they just sort of popped into my head and stuck there. And even if the initial idea/line/phrase feels inspired, I’m consciously tinkering with it right away. Still, that first spark does often feel like it comes from somewhere else. Not outside of me, maybe, but maybe from some part of me I’m not aware of. What I will say is that I have to put myself into a position to be inspired. I have to have the conversations, read the books, experience the moments that can provide that inspiration. And then there’s the matter of being able to do something with inspiration when it arrives. I think that when I first started writing, I was often inspired but unable to turn that inspiration into a poem that captured that experience in any meaningful way. How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

Well, from very early on in the writing process, I settled on the anaphora of “That same year...” as an organizing principle of the poem. The title gives away the final anecdote, and the anaphora reminds the reader of what’s coming, what the poem is building up to. So that repeated phrase aligns all the other incidents in relation to that one, final incident.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

It appeared online about a year after it was written, then it appeared in my second book a couple years or so after that.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

Not very long, usually. When I send a group of poems off to a journal, if one of those poems is accepted, it’s often not the one I would have expected. I’ve written poems I thought were very strong and polished that were never published, and then there have been poems that I was unsatisfied with that were snapped up almost instantly. So I don’t try to pre-judge whether a poem is “ready” or not if I can help it, and once I have what feels like a complete draft, I send it out. I remind myself that sending it out today doesn’t prohibit me from revising it six months from now, especially if it isn’t picked up.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

Well, a dead whale was dynamited on a beach near Florence in 1970, and the resulting destruction in the poem is fairly faithful to what actually happened—a nearby parking lot was showered with chunks of rotten whale, crushing at least one car. However, the real people decided to dynamite the whale, wiser than the characters in the poem, resolved never to try it again, so that’s different. And the rest of the poem is entirely fictional. I just imagined various extensions of that one act, imagined what it would be like if a whole town approached all of its problems in that way. When it comes to writing poems, I’m not very loyal to the facts, if they get in the way of a good story, and in this case, because I was writing about a real incident in which real people were involved, I wanted to fictionalize it as much as possible, to make a clean break from the real history of the event so that I was free to explore the idea on a more surreal level. And that’s typical of how I approach true events in my writing.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes, I think so.

At the heart of this poem is the specter of morality, the idea of right and wrong. Is all good poetry in some way ethical or just?

I suppose you could call it morality. I think that writing toward a particular moral/ethical position is poisonous. It rarely results in good poetry. That said, most (maybe all) great poetry does have something valuable to say about our ethical/moral lives, if only obliquely. And I think the same poem can give conflicting moral lessons and still be a great poem. I think that good poetry is created out of a conviction that what’s being written about matters, that the act of writing about it and reading about it matters, even (or maybe especially) if the poet can’t articulate exactly why that particular thing matters. The act of blowing up a whale just resonated with me. It wasn’t that I saw that act as falling on some spectrum of right to wrong. I think you can read that act as folly, but I think you can just as easily sympathize with those people. I certainly do. In the penultimate incident in the poem, an estranged son cuts out his own tongue after his mother (who was the last speaker of his tribe’s language) dies. Earlier, a woman who discovers she’s infertile starts hoarding garbage. Like blowing up the whale, those may not be rational responses to trauma, but they’re responses I can empathize with. So I think that while the poem shows how these kinds of acts can be self-defeating, I also hope that it redeems these acts emotionally, that it helps us understand them. That’s the kind of poetry I aspire to write, anyway.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

The question I continually ask myself is: “Would I keep reading this? Would this interest or excite me?” I think it’s dangerous to try to project too far out, to speculate about what some hypothetical reader or critic will respond to. The danger of this philosophy, I suppose, is that you can become your own echo chamber, reinforcing your own bad habits. The antidote, I think, it to push your tastes by reading more, reading outside your typical comfort zone, which I try to do.Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Yes, I have a poetry group (three other writers) who read this poem and who have read most of what I’ve written for the past few years. They’ve been incredibly good to me. Unfortunately, two of us are moving to different states this year, and I think we’re breaking up. I think the chemistry we have as a group is something we built over time, and I hate to lose that. The thought of having to build it again somewhere else, with other people, is a little terrifying.

What is American about this poem?

I love that question. The poem is American in superficial ways—it takes place in an American city, for example. But I think, more broadly, that the closing phrase “we need more dynamite” evokes a certain American cultural and political philosophy. It’s about the worship of more, of excess, even when the excess is of destruction itself. The deployments of that philosophy venture into surreal territory in the poem, but they do reflect the way Americans actually approach the anxieties of life, from people who believe that concealed carry laws are the solution to gun violence or that our most important civic duty after a national disaster like 9/11 is to go to the mall and spend lots of money. I don’t mean to condemn this kind of thinking, because I’m a part of that same culture and I think that way too sometimes. But I do think that it’s a particularly American way of thinking. And many of the anxieties that come up in the poem—from quotidian conflicts, like athletic rivalries, to more alarming problems, like the way that unique cultures and histories can be eroded and disappear—are also very American concerns. So I think the poem is particularly American, though I didn’t have that in mind when I wrote it.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

David Huddle was born in Ivanhoe, Virginia, in 1942. He attended, flunked out of, and--after serving in the US Army from 1964 until 1967--finally graduated from the University of Virginia in 1968. He holds an MA in English Writing from Hollins College (1969) and an MFA from Columbia University (1971). He began teaching at the University of Vermont in 1971, from which he retired in 2009. Currently Visiting Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University, Huddle also teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and The Rainier Writing Workshop. He’s published two novels, a novella, five collections of short fiction, and a volume of essays called The Writing Habit. University Press of New England also published A David Huddle Reader in 1994. Huddle’s poetry collections are Paper Boy (1979), Stopping by Home (1988), The Nature of Yearning (1992), Summer Lake: New and Selected Poems (1999), Grayscale (2004), and Glory River (2008). He is currently finishing a novel called Nothing Can Make Me Do This and a poetry collection called Blacksnake at the Family Reunion.

to say it, but I have in mindthis cautionary tale a friendtold me about getting the shitbeat out of him in a Jacuzzi

by some guys he’d insulted--he said it was pretty mythic.Naked, he got pounded bloody,and they almost drowned him.

I’m way past the age of wantingto fight, even though hostilitystill has its little condoin my emotional village.

Also, I’m a father of daughters,girls who often enough give melooks that say, My God, is thathow it is with you men? You’re

all crazy! I know they studyme, their model male, the oneby which they’ll measure allother men who approach them.

So I stay quiet enough to hearmy sweat drops hit the bench slatsand the boy’s dad’s breathing.What I don’t hear but feel anyway

is how this guy’s ashamedof his boy, this guy wisheshis kid were bigger, louder,had a prick that didn’t make

him want to laugh out loud,and for Christ’s sake didn’thave to wear those stupid bug-eyeglasses. That’s what I hate,

when my good buzz of hostilityturns into this pissy pity.I’m down off the bench and outthe door and into the shower,

taking the water as coldas I can stand it. But here’s what’s weird here, the guyjust keeps staying in there.

I’m out of the shower,toweled dry, dressed, and combingmy hair, when it occurs to methat he’s got to have been

in there half an hour by now,which to me would be torture,assuming I could even forcemyself to stay in there so long.

I’ve got my gym bag packed upand my coat on when the boy,dressed now in a hockey jerseythat makes me notice how thin

his shoulders are, trudges by meon his way back to the sauna doorto have another word with his dad.I don’t hear it. I’m out of there.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

“Men’s Sauna” was composed within days after I had the experience on which the poem is based. I might even have started it the morning after I lived it. It’s a very autobiographical piece of writing. It’s been eleven or twelve years since I wrote it, and so when I read it now, it seems to me to be about ninety-eight percent “true.”

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

“Revisions” meant one thing to me when I composed my poems on a typewriter—and each revision was tangible—and another now that I compose on a computer. Nowadays when I work on a poem as long as “Men’s Sauna,” I make hundreds of changes that disappear into cyberspace before the poem ever is printed up and becomes a “hard copy.” On the one hand, I revise much more extensively than I did when I composed on a typewriter, but on the other hand, there are significantly fewer tangible revisions. “Men’s Sauna” is not one of my formal pieces, which require a great deal more tinkering than a free-verse piece like this one. The discipline here is pretty loose—short lines in four-line stanzas; it requires some attention to matters of form—most of them having to do with line-breaks—but it’s a relatively easy discipline, one that feels very comfortable for a narrative piece like “Men’s Sauna.” How many hard copies might I have made of it? Maybe as many as five. Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I do believe in inspiration—but only in the kind that comes to me while I’m writing. If the chemistry is right between me and the thing I’m trying to make, then many good ideas (or poetic decisions) come to me as I’m writing. I write five or six times as many poems as I ever try to publish, and the ones I publish are always “inspired” in this regard. “Men’s Sauna,” however, is a “gift” poem—meaning that not a great deal was required of me other than trying to fashion a poem out of the experience as I had lived it. My mission was to make a poetic documentary. This is a kind of poem I’m lucky enough to write every now and then, but not very often.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

Very early in its composition—most likely in my tinkering the opening lines into that first stanza—the poem found its way into short-line quatrains, and that relatively easy form greatly enabled the writing of it. I wasn’t concerned with meter or rhyme or syllable count. The loose form generated a natural narrative cadence that kept it moving and that allowed me to be mostly concerned with the voice of the speaker. He’s a “persona”—someone who’s a very slight exaggeration of me—and in that regard I was probably practicing (without thinking about it) something like the technique of writing a short story in the voice of a somewhat cantankerous-minded narrator.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

I don’t remember that it appeared in print before it appeared in Summer Lake. Because of its length and its being an overtly narrative poem, it would not have been easy to place it in a journal, and so I probably didn’t even send it out.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I try not to send a poem out right away, because in the days after I’ve initially declared a poem to be finished, I often find myself making little changes in it, usually ones that don’t make a great deal of difference in the overall success or failure of the poem. But sometimes a small change can make a huge difference in a poem’s success. So let’s say I try to wait until it’s been at least a week since I’ve done any tinkering on the poem. And even then—I confess—sometimes I’ll find myself doing a last little bit of tinkering just before it goes into the envelope and I seal it up so that I can’t see it any more.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

In the case of “Men’s Sauna,” this is an easy question—and it usually isn’t an easy question with my work, because, regardless of what genre I’m writing in, I’m almost always mixing fact and fiction. In this case I pretty much went with fact. There’s a slight bit of unintentional fiction in the voice of the poem’s speaker, but not enough to really count.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yep.

At the heart of this poem is the specter of morality, the idea of right and wrong. Is all good poetry in some way ethical or just?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes. Which is not to say that the poem wants to preach or to offer moral or ethical guidance. It is only to say that the generating force of this poem—and most of my writing—is moral and ethical anxiety.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

Tough question. I used to claim I thought about audience only after I had finished the piece of writing and had begun to wonder where I should send it. In recent years, however, I’ve been writing with my students, and in that case I’m writing for the immediate audience of the writing class where I will present my poem alongside the other poets presenting theirs. I do still like to think that I don’t write “to” any particular audience. This is sort of like confessing that one is somewhat promiscuous but one is not a complete slut.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve had a longtime reader, Ghita Orth, a former colleague in the English Department of the University of Vermont, a poet who writes only occasionally nowadays. She’s my first reader and the person whose opinions, suggestions, and corrections are essential to my work. Before it was possible to exchange manuscripts by way of email attachments, I used to drive my work the eight or nine miles from my house to Ghita’s house to get her response as soon as possible. I claim that some part of my creative mind resides within her skull.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

Though they were written years apart, “Men’s Sauna” has a “brother” poem, “Is There Anybody Here I Can Say Goodbye To?” that appears in Grayscale. Both of them use my experience in men’s locker rooms as my subject matter. Most of my work in all genres has to do with my being a man (or having been a boy)—I claim that what I’m trying to do in my writing is tell the world what it feels like to live as a man. So maybe these two locker-room poems are the most direct and candid (and naked) treatment of a general topic of mine. For a while in my life, I claimed to be the poet laureate of men’s locker rooms. If such a position ever comes open, I expect to be a leading candidate for it.

What is American about this poem?

Nothing more than it describes an ordinary little piece of American life.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

I’d say finished—mostly because of its nature. Other poems of mine are abandoned because the complexity of the subject matter means that “completing” them is impossible. In this case, there was a tangible assignment—to describe my encounter with that guy in the sauna. I did it, and as far as I’m concerned, I did justice to the experience. Reading it over these years after I composed it, I have no inclination to make even the smallest possible change in it. Finished.

No one answers, but I hear the TV’s drone. I push open the door and there’s my old dadhanging like an exhausted gymnast over the arm of the couch,his fingers touching the floor, his pajamas on inside out. How does he survive the booze, the pills, the lack of foodand love? Who could love him? I love him,but what is this? Again, I have found him in time to take him to the hospital.“I want to die,” he cries as I fold him into the car,and it becomes his mantra while I drive past the bowling alley, the gun shop. Should I stop and buy a pistol?“I have nothing to live for,” he says. What can I say?There is nothing to live for;we make it up as we go along. The earth didn’t have to exist, but here it is, and here we are,parked in the Emergency lot. He stares fiercely out the windshield. I touch his hand; it’s cold and scaly.“There’s always bowling, I joke.“I don’t bowl,” he says. We smile at each other. “There’s this,” I say to my father.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

In 1998, on Father’s Day, my father nearly killed himself from drinking too much. After this particular occasion, after I got home from taking him to the hospital, I started writing the poem.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

In one sense, I’d been writing this poem for decades. My father struggled with alcohol addiction most of his life, and I was his loyal witness. But the actual writing of the poem took about five months. I’m sure I put it through the mill of the workshop. In 1996, I started taking a poetry workshop from Kim Addonizio. I’m still in her workshop today!

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I believe if you take two steps toward the gods, they take three toward you. You have to show up to the writing desk every day (maybe you get the weekend off for good behavior) and make yourself available. This poem is definitely the result of the sweat and tears of my life with my father and the life of working at my writing. Poems come to me easily, but I only show them to my cat or my writing buddies, and they usually undergo major construction and remodeling.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

I read my poems out loud over and over, so I memorize them and then can work on them wherever I travel during the day. I like to run almost every day, and I find that’s a good way to start revising. I get away from the writing desk, into a new place physically and can hear and see the poem more objectively. Sometimes I take my poem for a ride to the grocery store and we sit in the parking lot and talk to each other. In this particular poem, I consciously employed the use of present tense for more immediacy and tension. Also enjambment of some of the lines to give it that headlong rush of finding my father once again in this perilous state. I used dialogue to try and show us, father and daughter, and our ability to find humor in a ghastly situation. My father taught me how funny life is and to never give up. He never gave up. He won his battle with alcoholism when he was seventy-five years old.

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

This poem was published in The Sun about eight months after I finished it.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I usually workshop my poems, so they go through a grueling regime before I even think of sending them out into the world. I know this about myself now: at first, I simply believe my poems are wonderful. Then I slowly wake up from my ego-trance and realize, “Gee, this poem isn’t doing a thing.” But then I begin tinkering, or I start another poem with some of the better lines. It’s a process, one that I love. I love to have a poem in my head. The ride to the grocery store helps. I should write a book called, The Parking Lot Poems.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

This poem is all fact, except for the gun shop. There really was a bowling alley. And the last line is fiction.

Is this a narrative poem?

Yes.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

Most of the time, I write for myself, a dialogue of self and soul. It’s a conversation with the world, though, too. Of course, I want to be read, so I guess I do imagine a good-willed reader out there who enjoys my voice. My poems are a sort of spiritual autobiography. I think of everyone’s poems that way, and I love to hear what the spirit has to say in its incredible variety.

What is American about this poem?

Yep, this poem is all-American. Not exactly Leave it to Beaver fare, but American as apple pie with a side of vodka.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

This poem was finished. Click, I heard the box shut. Someone taught me that a good close to a poem is both surprising and inevitable. I think I accomplished that here.

Remember those Saturday morning cartoons—A safe creeping up the side of a building On ropes meant to break and a man Strolling below, whistling, blissfully unaware, But blessedly inches out of reach When the ropes give way just as expected, The safe planting itself in the sidewalkLike a down payment on another life.

Well let’s say the man is a guy I know, A good husband and father of two And that he’s just come up From the subway into the splendid sunOf an autumn day and he’s dawdling, Drinking a second cup of coffee, Maybe enjoying the angle of the sunFalling between buildings and the blue

Prospect undisturbed by clouds,When a plane explodes into the building Where he works and, as he watches, His entire building collapses. In the months to come, his odd luckTeaches this sane and orderly manThat his life is neither sane nor orderly.He is a good man, kind and loving,

But, though he tries to return to lifeJust as before, he cannot stop believing He must change his life. A year laterHe leaves his wife and kids with plenty Of money, and tries to begin again. He travels for a while, saves time For himself, reads more novels, joins A Buddhist Center. Two more years go by.

The shock has worn off. The manHas resettled thousands of miles away In another city much like the one he left. He still stops at Starbucks for a second cup. He’s remarried—a second wife hardly differentFrom the first. He’s back doing the same Kind of work, getting in some golfOn the weekends. That’s the story

He tells me one afternoon inside the dark Of his favorite bar where he’s holding up A cell phone. The leaves are turning colors Again. We hoist a few, fall into the ball gameOn the TV, waiting for a couple of playersTo get on base, or someone to hit one out. But it’s a pitcher’s battle, lots of beginnings Turning out as repetitions and zeroes

On the scoreboard. We’re both Pretty drunk when he looks into his drinkLike he’s reading entrails for a doomed Empire. He says he can’t stop feelingThat there’s a giant hole in the middle ofEverything. In his dreams, he’s alwaysAt the edge of the hole and looking down. He knows nothing can ever fill it.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

Like most of my poems, this one knocked around in my head for a time. Shortly after September 11, there were newspaper reports of people who had stopped for coffee or had missed their usual train, or were just dawdling in the good weather, and so were not yet at their office in the World Trade Center when the first hijacked plane exploded into the tower. The actual poem began two years later when the opening lines about the Saturday morning cartoons popped into my head. It was more the voice of those lines than their content that mattered—it helped me think of those reports less realistically and more as a possible parable I could tell. I never wanted to address 9/11 directly; I didn’t have the stomach or the talent for it.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

This was an odd poem for me. I kept putting it off, primarily because I thought any writing about 9/11 would end in falsely appropriating the event. When I did start the poem finally, the time scheme between first and final drafts was much the same as my other work—for me usually six months to a year between starting a poem and sending it out to magazines. “Life Changes” fit that pattern.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I think most poems involve both. Most of my work is the result of a number of revisions, the trial and error process of trying to get said what wants to be said, and the coming to know what can go unsaid. Much of the time is taken up with plotting the poem; cutting out what doesn’t need to be there; finding the poem’s form on the page. But I cannot usually begin a poem until I “hear” the voice of the poem. And the voice of this or that poem often seems “received” and curiously magical.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

Because of my teaching schedule, I tend to draft poems in the summer and then work on revisions during the fall semester. I usually exchange poems with a couple of other poet friends during this time. And then I send poems out during the second semester.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

Though the poem alludes to September 11 and uses the facts of the day itself, “the guy I know” in the poem is entirely fictional. I was looking to create something like a fictional character who is both unlikable and sympathetic, and in whom we could see ourselves and the way, to tinker with the cliché, the more we change, the more we remain the same.

Is this a narrative poem?

Telling a story is important to me, and yet I’m always trying to find the right mix of narrative and lyric elements.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I don’t remember if I was reading someone in particular. I do remember I was trying to write more “parable” like poems at the time. One of my favorite poets, George Herbert, is always in my head, especially when I’m considering the dangers and pitfalls of trying to live an honest spiritual life. And I can see the influences of Carl Dennis and Stephen Dunn whom I admire a great deal.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

I think my ideal reader is someone who is struggling to figure out how to live his/her life—as I am.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours? What is American about this poem?

I was probably more deliberate here in trying to link the struggle to live a meaningful life to the historical events of September 11. After the horror of September 11, the historian David Levering Lewis described the event as a “virtual consecration on the part of Americans to self-assessment and to probing the circumstances that produced the greatest violation of our sense of self since Pearl Harbor. Indeed when people asked, Why do they hate us, a large number of Americans were encouraged to believe that there might be an earnest and prudent and informed search for answers to that question.” I asked that question myself. And today, I find myself still asking that same question because in some ways “Everything has changed, though nothing has.” I don’t intend by asking such a question that we ever lose sight of the monstrous wrong that was done that day; but I believe that we still need to ask and keep asking why many people around the world were not astonished that the terrible events of that day happened.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

Aren’t all poems abandoned once the writer reaches the best rhetorical finish he/she can achieve? As Eliot said, our words are “raids on the inarticulate.”

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Paula Bohince is the author of two poetry collections, both from Sarabande: Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods and the forthcoming The Children. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt Trust, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Pennsylvania and is the 2010-2011 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholar.

SPIRITS AT THE EDGE OF BAYONET WOODS

Crabgrass thickens, and catalpas bloomgigantic, hoping to hide our homestead, the povertyand grime that kept us mired herefor generations, as if we were sleepingoff a bender for one hundred years.Sooty hankies against our mouths, in the kitchenchicken spitting in the fryer,thick smoke rising, and we’re in the mineshafts,the ones that swallowed our menand cooked them and spat them into our beds.Forgive us, Lord, we did not know them,humpbacked and ruined, crawling toward uswanting clean shirts, kisses, more children.Tell me, what was a woman’s purpose in those woods?Trading quails’ eggs for the babies’ medicine,boiling lye and animal grease to shampoo coal dustfrom our men’s curling hair?They clung to us in sleep, that watery place,and I swear, as I lay beside my own husbandI did not know him, even as he struck me,muttering his terrors, whimpering the struggleof slowly drowning in a shaft flood, or burningalive in a coke fire. And though we pitied Grace,the valley’s only suicide, we understoodwhen she wrote, I cannot go on here, in this place…In fact, we watched her strip beside Stone Pathwhere she had gone to pray, faithful to the current’sconstant swirling, watched her weep besidethe river’s illiterate banks, lay her dress uponits slick grasses, wade into the inch of loam,then lie facedown in its merciful pull.Forgive her, Lord, for leaving this earth so early.She was terribly lonely.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I wrote this poem sometime around 2004, when I was living in Queens and in the thick of writing my first book. I think that it started as a series of notes, lines, images, and details jotted down over a few weeks that I would keep adding to. A messy notebook page. A big buzzing cloud. So I was accumulating ideas and letting them simmer. When I felt ready to plunge into a first draft, I tried to go a little blank and see what would make its way in. The first line seemed to set the tone and cadence that the rest of the poem fell in line with.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

The poem was first written by hand on notebook paper, and then changes occurred as I made the transfer onto the computer, and then as I rewrote version after version, one after another, in the same document. This is my usual process and what I would call the initial composition. I really don’t consider these various versions revisions, but more the act of building toward a workable draft. Hopefully I’ll have enough time, meaning a few hours all at once, to get something sufficient done during this stage, to feel that “click” of the poem being mostly in place and the accompanying sense of relief.

For some reason, I’ll delete all of the previous versions almost as soon as I feel like I’ve hit upon the one that feels most right. I don’t know if I do this so I won’t feel conflicted about my choices or to achieve some sense of completion. Since I don’t save these other versions, it’s hard to say what the number would have been. Once I printed out this poem, I do remember tinkering with it for a while – a few months -- but I would consider these subsequent changes on the smaller scale of edits rather than vaster revision.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I really love Jane Hirshfield’s book Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. I don’t want to paraphrase, but it helped me to ready my mind for poems. I was working so hard during this period in my life, it felt punishing. Everything I was doing in my waking life felt like it was in the service of that first book. Her book helped me learn how to receive, which is to say, helped me learn how to live. So yes, I do believe in inspiration. This poem felt both received and earned.

How long after you finished his poem did it first appear in print?

It was published by Shenandoah in 2006, so a year and a half to two years.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

It varies, but usually a few months.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

This entire poem is from my imagination, although the family homestead was a real place, in the family for several generations until my father’s death. My uncles from this side were coal miners, and my aunts were generally housekeepers. Grace is an invention to embody all I wanted to say about women in this particular place.

Is this a narrative poem?

I think it is one narrative suggesting a larger one.

Do you remember what you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write? An ideal reader?

I don’t have a specific audience in mind. Especially with this first book, I was writing it so much for myself because I didn’t know if it would be in the world. I suppose my ideal writer would be kind, empathetic, and generous. Who doesn’t want unconditional love?

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

No, I don’t believe anyone saw this poem before it was finished. I haven’t shown anyone my work, in terms of critical feedback, for a few years now. I do show my husband poems now and again, but not for critique.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

This poem feels very different from most of my other poems. I don’t usually write persona poems, although I don’t remember consciously making the choice to do so here. My other poems might be a bit airier in terms of visual space and are perhaps more lyrical and associative than this one. This poem feels especially literal to me.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

John Hodgen lives in Shrewbury, MA. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, and also teaches at Mount Wachusett Community College and the Worcester Art Museum. He is the author of Heaven and Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; In My Father's House, winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas; and Bread Without Sorrow, winner of the 2002 Balcones Poetry Prize, Lynx House Press /Eastern Washington Unversity Press, 2001. He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for Poetry, first prize in the Red Brick Review poetry competition, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award in Poetry in 2000.

FOR THE MAN WHO SPUN PLATES

On the old Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, before Top Gigio, the dancing mouse,before the Beatles and the Mersey Beat, before we all knew all we needed was love,someone to kiss us goodnight, there was a man who spun plates on long slender poles,running from one side of the stage to the other, the crowd calling out to him when a plate started wobbling, the man so intently spinning plates in the air, a little like Jesus before the Last Supper,keeping his disciples’ haloes from falling, the crowd like the masses with the bread and the fishes, crying, Judas, watch Judas, his halo is falling, Jesus too busy holding up the whole world. And sometimes he’d miss one and we’d all see it fall, shatter like crystal all over the stage, and we loved him even more then because he was real, working as hard as the devil for us.

But we didn’t know then that our lives would break too, my good friend whose daughter just drowned in Brazil, his plates all come down like a crockery sea. He tries to lift her up again, get her life spinning, as if he could raise her from under the waves, the waves that keep falling, one after another, like shimmering plates on the sea.

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

The poem probably began when I was a boy watching Ed Sullivan on a black and white Philco my father bought back in the day, the whole family in utter and absolute thrall, Ed, in his distinctive, nervous mumble, introducing the plate spinner, the master of all our nervousness. I think it was the very first time I actually spoke to the TV, a barely hidden yet heartfelt whisper, expressing fear (what else?) that one of the myriad number of plates the man had set spinning on the tops of long slender sticks had begun to wobble so precariously that it was surely going to crash to the stage if someone didn’t tell him. So I did. Now I think that’s what every poem is, that whisper against the world that might be breaking at any minute, the world that calls for us to speak in order to be saved.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

The poem came together when I received word that a dear friend and fellow poet, Chris Howell, had lost his daughter, who had drowned in Brazil. I couldn’t help but think there was a parallel in how one keeps plates spinning and how one goes on after something so unspeakably devastating, how we try to hold our children up, how profoundly fragile they are, and how we hold up each day after the world has broken and shattered. I struggled a bit with the ending, trying to compare the white tips of the waves to the plates before they crash.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I do believe in inspiration, think we receive moments all our lives and simultaneously wait to connect them to another moment as we experience it. I think we receive those moments fully only if we are paying attention. I know as well that I am unworthy to receive them, yet I truly think that that is what is asked of us. We can call up a memory, even one as mundane as having been moved enough to speak aloud to a TV, for example, when we are receiving another moment, that deep grief and concern for a friend’s tragic loss. It is the image that suddenly parallels, the momentary picture of an Everyman trying to hold up the world against grief and loss.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

The only technique was to let the initial image take me where it wanted, to trust it, follow it with whatever associations came to mind. The memory was a distant but fairly clear image of a man on a brightly lit stage with all the fragile plates. Suddenly I was thinking of Jesus and the Last Supper. All those plates. Then, just trusting the image, I thought of the haloes in all the old paintings, like plates in the air behind all their heads. Additionally, it seemed to me the poem was about the audience as much as anything else, the Ed Sullivan audience, another kind of Sunday church audience, and then the audience we all comprise, an aesthetic audience, perhaps, thinking how we all see those famous paintings of the Last Supper, especially da Vinci’s, but even Dali’s too, as a kind of cathartic tableau, a staged presentation, the audience already knowing the trouble brewing, the impending disaster, the clear danger to Jesus, the greatest plate spinner of them all. And there is that compulsion, as with any great art, to be moved to speak, to cry out.

How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I don’t have any hard and fast rules about how long to let a poem sit. A friend said once to let a poem breathe for three days and then go back to it, and the mistakes will be obvious. I trust that, trust my workshopping friends, and trust that no poem is perhaps ever completely finished. I don’t obsess about revision. The next poem is always calling.

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

I’ve workshopped in Cambridge and the environs for nearly thirty years now with a fine group of poets called collectively Every Other Thursday, which might very well on any given night be the best writing workshop in the country.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

Regarding whether this poem is fact or fiction, this poem consists of two juxtaposed facts, the childhood memory and my friend’s terrible loss. The fiction, if it is fiction, comes in the associations that are there to be made, primarily the comparisons that exist between the plate spinner and Jesus. Comparisons are there as well, hopefully, concerning the audience, the one for the Ed Sullivan show, the other being the audience of those considering the image of the Last Supper and all that it entails.

Is this a narrative poem?

It’s a narrative poem, two closed stories, yet the hope is that the juxtaposition creates a third ongoing, open-ended narrative within the reader, the stories asking the reader to reflect or engage in his or her own unfinished story.

At the heart of this poem is the specter of morality, the idea of right and wrong. Is all good poetry in some way ethical or just?

Every poem has its own prism of morality, a single voice registering its sense of what is just and valuable. One of the reader’s tasks is to sound out that voice, to align with or against it. If the poem isn’t about something right or wrong, if it doesn’t try to help or heal in some way, even in its anguish, humor, irony, or even rage, it doesn’t really ever fully become a poem.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

As far as an ideal reader, I think it was Donald Justice who had a poem about riding on a train through the Midwest and seeing someone’s light on at 3 a.m., a farmhouse, I think, someone up at that hour, weary and conflicted, or just beginning another long day. That’s the person I’m thinking of as my ideal reader.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

Influences include: everything by Shakespeare; everything by Keats, including the letters; and everything by John Donne; James Agee’s Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with the unforgettable Walker Evans photographs; Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry, where I discovered Lorca and Machado, and the Russians Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, and Voznesensky; Hayden Carruth’s anthology of 20th Century American poets, The Voice That is Great Within Us; Bly’s edition of Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems; two books by Frank Stanford, who loved Lucinda Williams and then shot himself, You and Crib Death, both out of print now from Lost Roads Press; Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Towards God (which I let someone borrow and never got back); Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, just for “The Colonel” which I still teach every year; Philip Larkin’s High Windows; Billy Collins’ Picnic, Lightning; and B. H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe. Great book. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. I’d grab Huck Finn, Sound and the Fury, Waiting for Godot, Gatsby, Farewell to Arms, To the Lighthouse, my daughter’s Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, and Hello, I Must Be Going, and the collected screenplays of Charles Bogle, a.k.a. W. C. Fields. Add the Bible, some Robert Frost and Bob Dylan, and I’m good.

About Me

Brian Brodeur is the author of the poetry collections Natural Causes (2012), which won the 2011 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Local Fauna (Kent State University Press 2015) and So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007). A 2013 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he is currently a George Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the PhD in English and Comparative Literature program at University of Cincinnati where he serves as an Assistant Editor for The Cincinnati Review.